Six years into a massive disruption of the newspaper business, most U.S. newspaper companies are driving hard toward solutions they hope will stop the revenue slide and stabilize the business. They are focused mainly on two things: driving costs down and driving digital sales up.

With revenues down by half since 2005, painful cost reductions have been keeping most newspaper companies alive and in the black. At the same time, some companies have achieved encouraging gains in digital revenue. But few have managed to fully offset their print declines, even in the most recent reporting periods.

So the business keeps shrinking.

Fewer people, fewer resources, more consolidations, more outsourcing, more partnerships, redoubled digital sales efforts … most newspaper executives probably believe they are rethinking everything.

But few are rethinking the assumption that news can be the heart of a successful local media model. Mostly, they’re just trying to produce as much news as they can with fewer people, distributing it on more digital platforms and selling more ads around it. They don’t seem to question whether news can generate the audiences and revenues they need to stay in business.

Here’s the brutal fact: News isn’t getting it done. Read the rest of this entry →